A Lifeline for Endangered Languages

During a gruelling interview at the All Things Digital conference, on May 28th, Walt Mossberg cut off the Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook mid-sentence to raise an uncomfortable subject for the company. “There is a level of control that you exercise—curation, one might say, not just in your app store but in other things,” Mossberg said. He then gave an example: Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, offers a single keyboard, in a tightly controlled number of languages, whereas Google’s Android, iOS’s biggest competitor in the phone market, allows user-developed changes—including multilingual keyboards—to be integrated with the operating system. With Android, “third parties can actually give you a choice,” Mossberg said. “Have you given any thought to a little bit less control?” It’s a question the endangered-language advocates of FirstVoices, a digital-technology initiative based in British Columbia, have been asking for three years.

Last June, FirstVoices launched an iPhone app that allows indigenous-language speakers to text, e-mail, and chat on Facebook and Google Talk in their own languages. Users can select from keyboards serving more than a hundred languages; the app supports every indigenous language in North America and Australia. (By default, iOS supports just two: Cherokee and Hawaiian.) The app accomplishes this through mimicry. When a text box is selected, a keyboard identical in form and function to iOS’s appears. The keyboard includes the characters necessary to write in, say, Cree, and follows a layout unique to the chosen language. (Cree’s equivalent of QWERTY would be ᐃᐱᑎᑭᒋᒥ). But the keyboards cannot exist outside of FirstVoices’s app. You can’t use it while surfing the Web; using it for e-mail is complicated. In this sense, the keyboards, like many of the languages they represent, are marginalized.

It is widely believed that the world’s languages number about seven thousand, with half of those predicted to die off by the end of this century. The threats to these languages are many—globalization, political and religious turmoil, climate change, disease—but, in recent years, awareness of the impending cultural loss has grown, along with efforts to stop it. A year ago, Google announced its Endangered Languages Project, a global crowdsourcing initiative that hopes to collect documents and recordings of endangered languages directly from speakers. FirstVoices, meanwhile, has provided language teachers and learners in British Columbia—home to sixty per cent of Canada’s indigenous languages—with online games, dictionaries, and now, the chat app.

The app débuted in February, 2012, before four hundred people, at a conference for the First Nations Technology Council. Its first official messages were exchanged by Steven Point, then the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, and Gwendolyn, his wife, who are speakers of Halq’eméylem. “The first message was, ‘Hi, I’m at the store. Is there anything you need?’ ” Peter Brand, the coördinator of FirstVoices, told me in excitement. “And she says, ‘Yeah, pick me up some fish.’ It was just a shopping list!” Ordinariness is an integral feature of the app. The language of legends and spiritual ceremonies, after all, can only do so much to save a culture; most of the responsibility falls on everyday communication.

David Underwood, a young SENĆOŦEN speaker, told me that he uses the app most often with his uncle, John Elliott, a co-founder of FirstVoices, and with Elliott’s son, PENÁW̱EṈ, who, like Underwood, learned SENĆOŦEN during an apprenticeship with an elder, just four years ago. The Master-Apprentice Program, administered by the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, which also oversees FirstVoices, aims to create new, fluent speakers of British Columbian native languages through immersion. For the young people making that leap—Underwood calls this a “personal revolution”—the ability to compose your thoughts through text as you gain footing in the new language can be edifying. The app, Underwood said, “bridges that gap—that social gap—of the pressures of having to be able to articulate yourself in person, on the spot. Text allows you to compose yourself a bit more.”

A keyboard app may fail to impress those who text or e-mail in English (or any of the forty-some other languages whose keyboards are supported by iOS), but it must be seen within the context of the languages it supports, many of which were exclusively oral until a documentation push in the nineteen-seventies. Lorna Williams, the chair of the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, created the writing system of her language, St̓át̓imcets, in 1973, by changing the Roman script to represent her language’s sounds. When the writing system was complete, she sent the details to a man in Hawaii, who modified an electric typewriter so that the language could be typed. The process was painstaking, and it marked a breathtaking technological leap: in the span of two years, St̓át̓imcets went from a language of the tongue to one of the IBM Selectric.

The iPhone app launched in 2012, but no Android app has been built yet. Chris Harvey, a linguist who has been making free indigenous-language keyboards since 1995 (his first was for Cree), and who input the app’s language data, told me this is because Android poses programming challenges, despite the ability to use custom keyboards through its operating system. (The difficulty of making indigenous-language keyboards for Android is a bit ironic, given Google’s efforts with the Endangered Languages Project.) Of course, even on the iPhone, the app isn’t perfect. To send an e-mail or text message, you have to write the entire message in a form in the app and then copy and paste it into the field you’ll actually use to send. (Again, this is due to Apple’s restrictions on incorporating third-party keyboards into iOS.) When I interviewed one young SENĆOŦEN speaker over Facebook chat on the app, messages were slow to send and receive. Even the app’s biggest champions admit its shortcomings: Lorna Williams said it was “not a sophisticated system,” while Brand referred to it as “clunky.”

Simply embedding endangered languages into the keyboards of smartphones will not save them. But, keeping these languages enmeshed in the fabric of daily life—which, particularly for the newer, younger speakers who are key to these languages’ survival, means being a viable way to communicate through technology—is the only way they will have even a slim hope of surviving. One of those new speakers—and texters—will be David Underwood’s daughter who, at two and a half, is fluent in English and SENĆOŦEN. Underwood has yet to speak to her in English, he said, and, depending on how you look at it, her first word was either extraordinary or completely unremarkable. “She said ‘EWE,’ ” Underwood told me. “It means ‘no.’ ”